EthnicMajority

(Boston Globe) President Obama is well positioned to repeat his strong performance with Hispanic voters one year before the 2012 election, according to a new Univision News/Latino Decisions poll.

In head-to-head matchups with the top three GOP presidential candidates, Obama holds substantial leads that exceed a two-to-one margin in every case. Latino voters prefer Obama 67 percent to 24 percent over Mitt Romney, 65 percent to 22 percent over Herman Cain, and 68 percent to 21 percent over Rick Perry.

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(The Hill) Democrats are counting on enthusiastic support from Hispanics to propel them to victory one year from now, even though a lack of progress on immigration reform under President Obama and increasingly harsh rhetoric from Republicans has left many Hispanics disenchanted with both parties.

Increasingly, no party or candidate with an eye toward Washington can afford not to appeal to this fastest-growing voter bloc in the country. Hispanics supported Obama by a two-to-one margin in the 2008 election over Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), then set a record for midterm voter turnout in 2010 when 6.6 million Hispanics showed up to the polls, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Obama remains much more popular with Hispanics than he does with the overall population. A poll released Nov. 8 by Univision/Latino Decisions showed 48 percent of Americans overall approved of his job performance; among Hispanics, it’s 66 percent.

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(Hispanic Ohio, Ruben Navarrette) Latinos in the United States have been betting on the numbers – their numbers.

In the last three decades, I’ve heard politicos, academics, activists and others boast that a swelling population would eventually bring the Latino community power and respect.

They include President Barack Obama, who just last month told a group of Latino online journalists gathered at the White House that he was confident that he’d see a competitive Hispanic candidate running for president during his lifetime.

“Just look at the demographics,” Obama said. “With numbers comes political power.”

Not necessarily, Mr. President.

The assumption has been that, at some point, the Latino population would become so large and its influence on everything from business to sports to food to pop culture would be so profound that it would be impossible to ignore.

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(Huffington Post) As Congress weighs the Obama administration's jobs package, RLJ Companies CEO Robert Johnson is pushing a proposal that he says marshals the capacity of the nation's biggest companies to significantly reduce black unemployment.

Johnson has dubbed his idea the "RLJ Rule." It calls on Fortune 1000 companies to voluntarily consider a more diverse pool of qualified candidates when filling senior level job openings and hiring contractors. Johnson has described it as the business version of the National Football League's Rooney Rule, a 2003 mandate that required teams to consider diverse candidate pools when filling senior positions.

Johnson, the United States' first black billionaire, has been critical of the way that the Obama administration and Congress have tried to address the nation's stubborn unemployment problem. He believes businesses can create solutions to social problems.

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(Examiner.com) Pop singing star Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll, a Grammy Award winner who is best-known for her 2 million selling CD ‘She Wolf’, has been enlisted by President Barack Obama's White House.  She has been asked to be a member of the President’s Advisory Commission on Education Excellence for Hispanics.  The Commission is a four-member group designed to advise the President and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. 

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(TalkTVWorld) A poll released today by NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo revealed a deep split in the opinions of white Americans and Hispanic Americans on the topics of immigration, the Arizona law and American politics. More than six in 10 Americans (61%) back Arizona’s controversial new immigration law, including 70% of whites but just 31% of Hispanics. Less than half (43%) of whites agree that immigration strengthens America, but the majority (68%) of Hispanics believe it does strengthen the nation.

Obama’s overall approval rating in the poll stands at 48%. But the divide exists here, too: Only about a third (38%) of whites approve of the president’s job, versus two-thirds (68%) of Hispanics who do. Similarly, only about a third (34%) of whites have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, versus more than half (54%) of Hispanics who do.

But the one thing all seem to agree on is their disapproval of President Obama’s handling of immigration reform — just 32% of the public approves of his job on this issue.

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Tip O’Neil famously said that “all politics is local”. I’m beginning to wonder whether his quote needs to be updated to account for the political strategies being deployed in the Obama era.

They started during the Presidential campaign, with attempts to create racial animosity from African American Reverend Jeremiah Wright, to questioning whether Obama was a Muslim, to doubting whether he is a legitimate U.S. citizen. The “birther” movement continues in spite of clear evidence that Obama is a U.S. citizen and that it is a hoax.

The attempt to reform the healthcare system is the latest example of taking perhaps the most important issue of our time, and reducing it to a fight along racial lines encouraged by enough mainstream Republicans to keep the insanity movement going.

To believe in this movement, you would have to believe that Obama: a) is a socialist, communist, and Nazi, b) is a racist and hates white people, and c) wants the government to make all of your medical decisions for you

You would also have to believe that the health insurance companies always put your best interests first, leave medical decisions to you and your doctor, and aren’t interested in making a profit.

If these are your true beliefs, you need to a psychiatric evaluation, assuming your insurance company doesn’t reject the claim.
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After Barack Obama became the country’s first African American President, I wrote on the Blog that we shouldn’t jump the gun on assuming America had become a color-blind society. Maybe I was wrong.

According to a New York Times public opinion poll, two thirds of the public feel that race relations are generally good, up 25% since last July. The percentage of African Americans answering affirmatively doubled during the same time period.

Obama’s election has accomplished what no affirmative action program ever could – convincing the public that diversity might actually be a good thing. Whereas much of the public views affirmative action a modern version of forced integration, Obama was the public’s choice.

Just as the Cosby show in the 80′s portrayed African Americans in counter-stereotypical way, Obama’s performance in the world’s toughest job and the class of the Obama family on display for all the world to see has definitely opened a lot of eyes. And a lot of minds.

Ethnicmajority politics page.